Dr Isabella Jackson

Assistant Professor in Chinese History

Research Interests

I arrived at Trinity in 2015, after lecturing at the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. I research the modern history of China and the global and regional networks that shaped the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on:

The International Settlement at the heart of Shanghai, looking at the transnational form of colonialism in practice there and how it functioned on the ground in the form of the Shanghai Municipal Council. My monograph, Shaping Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

‘Habitability in the Treaty Ports: Shanghai and Tianjin’, in Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao (eds), The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 169-91

‘Who ran the treaty ports? A study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’, in Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (eds), Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 43-60

‘Expansion and Defence in the International Settlement at Shanghai’, in Robert Bickers and Jonathan Howlett, eds, Britain and China, 1840-1970: Empire, Finance and War (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 187-204

‘Chinese Colonial History in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15:3 (2014)

Teaching and Supervision

In the Department of History I teach a Sophister module ‘China 1911-1949: From Republican Revolution to Communist Revolution’ and co-coordinate the Freshman module ‘Imperialism to Globalism: Europe and the World 1860-1970’. In the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, I teach modules on the MPhil in Chinese Studies: ‘Modern Chinese History’ and ‘Early 20th Century Chinese History’. I also contribute to the Broad Curriculum module ‘Introduction to Asian Studies’ and the MPhil module ‘History, Memory and Commemoration’.

I am currently supervising PhD students working on the material culture of western medical objects introduced to late Qing and Republican China and on town planning in Republican China. I am keen to supervise research students working on any aspect of colonialism in China or the interaction of western and Chinese people, politics, culture, and society in the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries.